Sunday, December 5, 2010

For the last few months I've found myself lacking motivation to work through tactical problems, reason being that after doing a trillion of them I wasn't seeing the improvement in my chess that I'd hoped for. Well, I went from 15-1800 on the ICC, but ICC ratings are probably more about concentration than improvement.

Anyway, I've started studying general attacking ideas recently in a bid to make more use of the tactical patterns I've learned, but even in times when solving problems isn't a priority I think we need to look at the occasional exercise to keep patterns we've learned fresh!

Ah nice- I had a strategy that if I lost to a particular tactical theme I'd force myself to go through a hundred of them that week. Slightly macabre but I couldn't stand it any longer after about 5 losses in a couple of months to skewers! Helped a lot actually:)